Every day, millions of people order Susan Bennett ’71 around. They
command her to look up directions to a restaurant, find a movie’s
starting time, schedule an appointment, or forecast the weather.
Bennett is the voice of Siri, the digital personal assistant embedded
in your iPhone.

Jefferson Graham

Susan Bennett '71.

When Apple introduced the iPhone 4S in 2011,
Siri was one of its hot new features. Soon users took Siri’s voice for
granted, and no one really thought much about the person behind the
voice until last September, when CNN approached Bennett and she confirmed the suspicion. Apple is staying mum—it refuses to confirm or deny
the connection—but CNN then confirmed her identity using a voice
analysis expert.

“I’m used to hearing my voice,” Bennett says, “but to hear it in a
handheld device that’s interacting with you is a brave new world.”

At Brown, Bennett majored in classics and Latin, but devoted herself
to singing in a jazz band. After graduation, she got gigs singing
backup with Burt Bacharach and Roy Orbison. She broke into the
voice-over industry by sheer luck. One day, while she was singing
jingles for commercials, the man who did the spoken
voice for the commercial didn’t show up. The studio owner asked her to
fill in.

“I discovered that I was able to do it pretty quickly and with decent
facility,” she says. “I said ‘Hey, great. This is something else I can
do that’s creative and has my love of words.’ It blossomed into other
things.”

In the mid-1970s, the First National Bank of Atlanta hired her to
promote what was then the country’s first ATM. The bank worried that
customers, so habituated to speaking with a live human being, would be
reluctant to use a silent machine, so they hired Bennett as the voice
of Tillie the All-Time Teller, a character they used in TV and radio
commercials. She’s also recorded commercials for McDonald’s and
Coca-Cola, and is the voice greeting Delta passengers at airports
around the country. “One day I’ll be doing a crazy voice for a
commercial,” she says of the voice-over life, “and the next I’ll be
reading instructions for an aviation manual.”

In July 2005, Bennett was asked by the computer company ScanSoft to
help develop their voice recognition software. For four hours a day,
five days a week until the end of the month, she sat inside her private
studio in her home in suburban Atlanta and read mostly nonsensical sentences.
“I was just speaking sentences to create the greatest combinations of
sounds in the English language,” she says. ScanSoft was eventually
bought by Nuance, which then licensed its software to Apple for the
voice of Siri. “I never imagined my voice would be for a telephone
system that would be in the palm of your hand interacting with you,”
she says.

Even though Bennett says she “usually” likes the sound of her own
voice, hearing a digitized version of herself coming from millions of
cell phones “was creepy.” Bennett mostly uses the Siri function on her
own iPhone "for fun," she says. “Typically, I would rather just push a button than talk to
someone,” she admits.

According to Bennett, Apple still uses her voice in the upgraded version of its mobile software, iOS 7, though she thinks they may have sped it up or even mixed it in with another person's speech. In the meantime, Bennett is
enjoying her newfound celebrity. “Suddenly, I have an L.A. agent and a
publicist and am doing The Queen Latifah Show and the Top Ten list for David Letterman and all these crazy things,” she says. “It’s quite overwhelming.”

Comments (5)

01/15/14

I appreciate the BAM having an article about me. For more information please go to www.susanCbennett.com . Thanks!

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01/16/14

Beautyfull article!

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01/17/14

I so enjoy talking to you almost daily. Keep in touch. Best wishes, Elie Hirschfeld '71

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01/20/14

And we knew you when!

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12/20/14

I asked my phone's Siri who does her voice and she dodged the question, as she is apt to do whenever you ask her about herself.

Mike

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